Her first job post-college was feature writer for a small-town newspaper, spreading the stories of the small businesses of southeast Wisconsin. From there, she developed proposals for an engineering firm, helping her firm win several big interchange and bridge design projects in the Milwaukee metro area.

She moved to Austin, Texas, where she initially volunteered for environmental causes (healthy food at the Sustainable Food Center and preserving plant diversity at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center). She applied for a position with the University of Texas International Office, didn’t get the job, and then asked if she could work, unpaid, for the person who did. Once her foot was in the door of the field, she applied for graduate school in student affairs administration.

During grad school and after, Andrea spent summers at UT-Austin and Yale, providing consulting services. She crafted a crisis management plan for UT and pre-departure orientation materials for Yale. With each project, she managed the project while seeking input and feedback from administrators and faculty, as well as those often overlooked: the students who would be affected by the policies.

While moving around the country with her future husband, Andrea created her own work as an entrepreneur. After a stint as a consultant for international travel risk management, Andrea designed and coded a travel web app called Unpackd. It featured audio recordings of the sounds of travel and off-the-beaten-path travel adventure stories.

Andrea also returned to marketing and editing around this time, taking word-of-mouth freelance jobs for book editing, book design, marketing strategy, and content creation.

A few years later, Andrea, her husband, and their one-year-old son settled down permanently in West Lafayette, Indiana. She next combined sustainability, plants, and entrepreneurship in an urban, organic flower farm in her backyard. She practiced employee management and lean business concepts and invented several versions of mini hoop-houses for growing and protecting her delicate crops. After three seasons of the farm, Andrea retired from the difficult, expensive work of farming in a very small space.

Coming up to the present day…Andrea returned to marketing, writing, and storytelling full time in 2020.

She adopted the business name A Ripe Mango — a hat tip to the fruitful stickiness of the stories that get new customers and win grants. Her client roster includes an indie publisher of health care guides, several Purdue departments, and a half-dozen small business clients.

In winter/spring 2023, Andrea was tapped by the head of Purdue Mechanical Engineering to help the department develop a program for securing multi-university research initiatives, known as MURIs. These highly-sought grants bring in multi-millions of funding to create long-term, networked research centers. The program aims to define the right system and methods for repeatedly pursuing and succeeding at MURI proposals.

Personally, Andrea is delightfully absent from social media, reads nonfiction, volunteers, and tends to the Indiana native plantings in her yard.